Out in my garage, my family has tub after tub of old photographs that we never see. The problem with it all is that they are so disorganized, that we never get to see them, yet there are so many photographs, that’s all we want to do.

For the last couple of years, 1000memories has been a service that users take advantage of by storing old photos that would otherwise be left to collect dust. Today, the company is launching a new set of features, a redesign, and a major overhaul of how the service will work in the form of Shoeboxes.

Shoeboxes are essentially virtual containers that hold related photos. For example, you could have a shoebox that holds old family wedding photos, or one with all of the Little League photos for 10 years. Each shoebox can hold as many photos as needed and provides a central place of storage for old photos.

While that is useful, what will likely be a key selling point is that shoeboxes are selectively collaborative. This means that in my case, I can create a shoebox and share it with family members, who can then upload photos of their own. For me, it means possibly creating a genealogy shoebox for some people, another for a good trip we’ve shared, and another for someplace I’ve lived.

1000memories is also looking into creating physical products in the next month that will take advantage of this. The company understands that these organized and collaborative works can easily be turned into a physical photo album, or a single image within the shoebox being turned into a postcard. This will likely end up being a very valuable revenue stream in the long run.

Of course, while all of these features will be valuable to users, it is hard to see how the service will differentiate itself from competitors. Many people have grown accustomed to storing and sharing photos over Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram, and so it may be hard to add yet another service to people’s digital lives. That being said, Shoeboxes may add a new layer of value by adding security features, tighter privacy controls, and a focus on much older photographs. If the market grows large enough, though, one of the more dominant photography players will likely enter it.

One possible additional way that it may be differentiating itself from competition is via a partnership with ScanCafe, which has also been announced today. ScanCafe performs one of the more irritating and cumbersome tasks, which is scanning in the photos themselves. With the partnership, users can send in their old photos in bulk and have the photos returned to them on a DVD.

That being said, at this point, the redesign and relaunch of 1000memories main page is likely to excite those groups of people that, like myself, never see the photographs from before the digital age.

Booker, which helps service businesses better engage with customers online, has raised $35 million in a Series C round led by Medina Capital, with participation from strategic investor First Data, Jump Capital, and Signal Peak Ventures, as well as existing investors. The New York City company now sees 3 million appointments booked monthly across 73 countries in 11 languages on its platform. [via Booker]

PCH, a company which “helps entrepreneurs turn ideas into brands and makes a variety of consumer tech products for major companies such as Apple,” has acquired Fab for a reported $15 million in cash and stock. Fab previously had a $1 billion valuation and raised $325 million. It will “continue to focus on design” at PCH. [Source: Bloomberg]

BlackBerry has unveiled several new smartphones at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, including the touchscreen-focused BlackBerry Leap and a device with a “dual curve slider,” in addition to its keyboard-equipped products. [Source: New York Times]

March 3, 2015

“I hope to have a bigger presence in the tech world. I love coming up with different app ideas, and I have a few more that are coming out. Once you get started and you have this creative bug of ideas that you want to get out, I feel like I’ve partnered with the right team, and now I have the creative outlet to make that happen. I’m happy that people are into it and perceiving it well. I just want to create more apps.”

PayPal is planning to acquire Paydiant, the company behind CurrentC — retailers’ answer to Apple Pay — for a reported $280 million. No word yet on how the companies will mix, nor if Paydiant’s relationship with the industry group behind CurrentC will remain intact. [Source: Re/code]

Microsoft is in talks to acquire Prismatic, a news aggregation service that uses natural language processing to recommend content in which its users might be interested, according to a report from TechCrunch. Apple, Yahoo, Google, and Facebook are all said to have expressed similar interest in the company. (Which is surely a sign of actual interest and not at all an attempt by someone at the company to make it seem like a hot commodity — right?) [Source: TechCrunch]

March 2, 2015

“Just wanted to confirm that the rumors are true — I’m excited to be running Google’s Photos and Streams products! It’s important to me that these changes are properly understood to be positive improvements to both our products and how they reach users.”

Samsung has announced Samsung Pay, a competitor to the Apple Pay product included in Apple’s latest iPhones, at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona. The feature will allow new Samsung Galaxy S6 owners who use MasterCard to pay for goods with their phones. It’s not clear when other credit card companies will be supported. [Source: The Guardian]